> As an American, I think a better metric for outcomes of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq is: were we trading with the before the war and are we trading with them one generation after the war?

At least you're honest. Personally I can't believe someone would think it's OK to invade someone else's county and massacre civilians on the scale of Vietnam or Korea in order to establish profitable trading relations.

It’s easy when you worship money and consider people of other races or cultures as less than human. Not that I am advocating for this view of course but a lot of Americans do even if they won’t admit it.

> Personally I can't believe someone would think it's OK to invade someone else's county and massacre civilians on the scale of Vietnam or Korea in order to establish profitable trading relations.

Strange. I don't remember writing that trading relations afterward justify the initiation of a war. Instead, I only remember writing that it is a better metric to assess the outcomes.

It's stranger still that you read these things between the lines, when my comment specifically includes a recollection of my own disquiet with the Afghanistan War, probably the most justified war of the four enumerated, that I felt while the war was happening.